Actually articles are quite simple, but that's easy for me to say as both my native German and English have them and use them in a similar fashion. Well, if you had to learn German you'd not only have to know when to use an article but also inflict declension on them, so English is the easy way out.

Well, and now that I really start to think about it, it's not quite so easy anymore. I can tell you that it really should be 'I like the sea' in the same way as it should be 'I like the sky'. And you don't use an article with uncountable things of which there still are quantities: milk, sugar, bread are examples. You only use a definite article with them, if you further define them with additional constituents of a sentence: I like milk, but I especially like the milk from the farm over there. However, adjectives etc. are no constituents of their own: I like curdled milk. But if given a choice of normal milk or curdled milk you could then say 'I like the curdled milk' - it's not curdled milk as such in this case, but it is a specific sample of milk set before you.

And it gets worse of course when you consider when to use definite and indefinite articles. It is getting quite off-topic for this thread, so I'll stop here. However, it is refreshing to see what (to us) simple things are hard for native speakers of Russian, so we don't have to feel so stupid when we have a hard time with the peculiarities of Russian.

Robin